Tuesday, August 23, 2011

This issue aims to collate interdisciplinary queer scholarship on sports and physical culture. This work should engage major issues in contemporary criticism – e.g. discourse on nationalism, autonomy and escape; neoliberalism esp. in relation to global economic and media flows; new media/art practices, creative and activist.

We are interested in topics like the following:

*The complicated legacy of the US’s Title IX (which impacts both sports studies and the gendered space of the academy more broadly)
*Discourses of race/sex/gender provoked by the public figure of the athlete
*The dizzying array of systems that manage the obvious homoerotics of sports culture (for good and ill)
*Transgender matters in sports/physical culture
*Disruptions of gender segregation, intersexuality and the athletic body
*Movement-based scholarship attending to sex/gender in relation to sport/physical culture
*Situated analysis of queer sporting communities
*Studies that speak to anti-homophobic activism in sports
*The athletic as a domain of queer performance

Also welcome are essays that center on athletes and athletic performances themselves.

These suggestions are meant to indicate the general scope of this special issue, and should not be taken as describing the limit of our interests. The aim of this issue is to explore how queer criticism expands our sense of what "sports studies" might be.

Authors should send two-page proposals (single space is OK) to Jennifer Doyle, at jennifer.doyle@ucr.edu before December 1, 2011.
Completed essays should be no longer than 8,000 words (including notes). Essays solicited from proposals will be submitted to peer-review.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

I wish I could take credit for finding this video of Pia Sundhage playing the guitar and singing a Swedish Joan Armatrading-ish track. My archive isn't that deep, however. So we owe a big thank you to Jen O'Neil of She Kicks (via twitter @SheKicksdotnet) and also @DandalBs, who explained that this is a "happy revolutionary song from the 1970s" and shared the following translation (of the title? lyrics?): "we are the legends for those who come after us." Indeed.

About From a Left Wing

Jennifer Doyle lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside. She wrote From a Left Wing from late 2007 until late 2013. Scroll through categories below for writing about gender, the international women's game, Los Angeles fútbol and more. You can read the preface to her most recent book here: Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Sometime in the near future, this whole blog will be taken down and archived, as she prepares to publish a book anchored in this writing.